Converting my software company from VB to Delphi
Clay Nichols
My software company ( http://www.BungalowSoftware.com ) has about 20
different programs, mostly written in VB 3.
We've stretched our sw architecture as far as we can, so it's a good
time to consider a different language for future programs (vb3 now being
12 years old or so).
I'm trying to make DELPHI our new language.
However, I'm having a really tough time finding LEARNING RESOURCES.
There seems to be no path for a NEW delphi developer to learn Delphi.
(I.e., all the beginner resources are for D6 or D7 and most of the good
intro books are D5 or so).
It seems that Borland doesn't really do much advocacy (that I can see)
of Delphi.
Can you folks suggest any good books, online resources, videos, etc. on
getting started with Delphi? An online tutor (paid, of course).
I've found some good resources (Delphi Basics in the UK is great).
Looking for more.
-Clay
cnicho...@yahoo.com
Dave
You are exactly right. Borland does a miserable job of promoting and
teaching Delphi. It appears that they don't care about individual
developers. the sad truth is the Microsoft's inferior products cost
less, are better documented, and have more resources available.
As much as I like Delphi, and I like it a lot, I would recommend that
you consider the possible problems with Delphi before using it for
your primary programming language. If you were to put an lot of effort
in learning Delphi and the Borland were to go out of business, or stop
supporting Delphi, you'd be in a mess.
Having said all of that, I love Delphi and use it almost exclusively.
For resources, Marco Cantu writes an excellent book entitled Mastering
Delphi. It is by far the best book available. There is also a
plethora of good information at www.marcocantu.com. Essentilal Pascal
and Essential delphi, are free on the site and are good places to
start.
Another very helpful site is http://delphi.about.com. There is a huge
amount of good information there including "A Beginner's Guide to
Delphi Programming.
And, of course, there are the Borland NewsGroups but I don't find them
as helpful as the above.
Best of luck to you!
Mac
Gary Wardell
> Delphi. It is by far the best book available. There is also a
> plethora of good information at www.marcocantu.com. Essentilal Pascal
> and Essential delphi, are free on the site and are good places to
> start.
I also have Marco's book.
I also like Borland Delphi 6 Developer's Guide by Steve Teixeira and Xavier
Pacheco, Sams, ISBN 0-672-32115-7.
I recommend getting both as they take difference approaches and cover things
differently.
Also the documentation that comes with Delphi isn't that bad.
I have an use all three.
I have Delphi 6, purchased used. I purchased the books from Amazon new &
used booksellers.
Delphi 7 was new at the time and had bugs and I am not interested in the
later versions that do .net. I do Win32 programming. I'm using Delphi for
writing ISAPI extensions for websites and COM+ middleware with SQL Server as
the data tier. In both cases Delphi outperforms VB6
As I get involved with Win32 quite a bit I also use the Microsoft Platform
SDK quite a bit and other books on the various MS technologies like COM+ and
ADO/OLEDB. These references are of course C++ oriented but one can transfer
the concepts and calls to Delphi.
As far as I can see there is nothing C++ can do that Delphi can't do; unlike
VB where the VB runtime always gets in the way. For example, in Delphi you
really can write a command line program that interacts with the command
prompt window. You can't do that in VB. You also can't write an ISAPI
extension in VB. It requires using call back functions and the DLL has to
be a standard DLL, not an Active-X dll which is the only kind VB produces.
As for Borland going away, well the compile won't stop working just because
Borland isn't there. AFAIK Delphi 6 doesn't call home for activation like
some other products do.
There is also Free Pascal which they tell me is Delphi compatible. And
there is Prospero Extended Pascal for Windows.
However, they tell me that Delphi has the best debugger and from what I've
seen it's not bad, although I think it has a few idiosyncrasies.
Gary
Augu...@gmail.com
remember that Borland is not Micro$oft . the products and tecnology is
very nice and so much bether , but you have to do a litle hardest work
to lern about it.
Consider to buy a teache, perhaps a developper with experience to teach
to you something about concept and techniques.
Regards
Augusto
Marco van de Voort
>
> There seems to be no path for a NEW delphi developer to learn Delphi.
> (I.e., all the beginner resources are for D6 or D7 and most of the good
> intro books are D5 or so).
>
> It seems that Borland doesn't really do much advocacy (that I can see)
> of Delphi.
>
> Can you folks suggest any good books, online resources, videos, etc. on
> getting started with Delphi? An online tutor (paid, of course).
>
> I've found some good resources (Delphi Basics in the UK is great).
> Looking for more.
Search for books from Marco Cantu. The Mastering series, but also his free
Object Pascal book, see
Besides that, Free Pascal, an attempt open source Delphi, also has an indepedant
set of manuals and examples, see
http://www.freepascal.org/docs.html
and specially
http://www.freepascal.org/docs/ref.pdf
while not 100% compatible, having a totally independant source can be quite nice.